Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / In this thesis I investigate the reconstruction of the life history of Sandra Laing
and the recreation of the apartheid context by analyzing two artefacts. These
main artefact for investigation is the movie Skin, by Anthony Fabian which is
based on the book "When She Was White: A Family Divided By Race" by
Judith Stone, which is the second artefact for investigation. The latter artefact
is based on the life of Sandra Laing. Sandra Laing was born to white parents
in the apartheid era, but she did not ascribe to the physical description of a
person who was classified 'white' in accordance with legal and social framing
thereof in apartheid South Africa. This posed many legal, social and political
difficulties for her family. I was particularly interested in the composition of
information sources and how semiotic resources are re-enacted, reused and
repurposed in the movie ‘Skin.’ The study is more theoretical than applied in
that it seeks to answer the question posed by Prior and Grusin (2010: 1): "How
do we understand semiotics/multimodality theoretically and investigate it
methodologically?" In the study I develop Prior and Grusin’s (2010) thesis by
working with notion of semiotic remediation as a focus on semioticity helps
me to focus on the signs across modes, media, channels and genres.
Therefore, the book on Sandra Laing and the movie are used as databases
from which to extract semiotic resources in the exploration and extension of
multimodality theory through multisemiotic analysis using semiotic
remediation as 'repurposing' in particular. In the process, the notion of
semiotic remediation becomes the tool for extending theory of multimodality,
by demonstrating the repurposing of semiotic material from the book, such
as apartheid artefacts, racialised discourses, dressing, racialised bodies and
bible verses, for example, into the recreation of apartheid in the movie 'Skin.' I employed a multisemiotic discourse analysis to analyse the data, which is
multimodal, and because I was interested in the complexity of the meaning
making process involving multiple modes of representation. This framework
was useful in analyzing the complex interaction between the various modes
for meaning making. I used resemiotisation and remediation as conceptual
tools to trace the translation of events across artefacts and how the material
and generic traces are reframed and repurposed within its new contexts for
new meanings in the movie 'Skin'. This study makes important contributions to research on the race debate in
South Africa in particular. Although apartheid laws have been repealed and
new democratic order is in place, the issue of race has flared in the media and
South African society generally. The recurrent debates on lack of
transformation in former whites only universities, the #FeeMustFall
Movement and recent debates in parliament about revisiting the land
redistribution issue all have racial undertones – the continued disempowerment
of the non-white South Africans. The focus on the recapturing
of the complexities surrounding the race debates and the implications of the
racialised society, particularly how they are conceptualized and rematerialized
within the semiotic limitations of book and a film contributes to a novel understanding of the making and lifestyles of inequality in apartheid South Africa. From a theoretical and analytical perspective, the study feeds on and extends the notion of multimodality to multisemioticity using the extension, semiotic remediation, not in the ordinary sense of mediating a new, but on the notion of the reframing and particularly repurposing of a particular social, political, cultural and historical semiotic material in new contexts in the recreated new worlds in the film and book. In this regard, the study provides interesting insights into the remediated reconstructions of race and racial inequalities, and the remodeling of artefacts and semiosis that are used in this reformation of the apartheid material cultures and contexts. In analysing the remaking of the apartheid culture in the film and the book, I theorefore make a unique contribution in identifying the semiotic materials that are indicative of the flawed nature of biological arguments for racial
classification and race-based social structuring. I discuss the implications of
this by analysing the remediation of the body as a racial scape, and the apartheid material culture as providing the semiotic landscape on which meanings are produced and consumed. The study thus contributes to research on recent developments in multimodality through its extension of semiotic remediation, which is designed to uncover the intricate interaction between semiotic resources in various media as well as their translation and repurposing across artefacts. In this regard, the study adds to extending the theoretical framing of multimodality thus: resemiotization accounts for the circulations of texts from mode to mode or one context to another, while semiotic remediation accounts for the repurposing of semiotic resources for different purposes and for their multiple meaning potentials. / National Research Foundation
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uwc/oai:etd.uwc.ac.za:11394/5231 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Ferris, Fiona Severiona |
| Contributors | Banda, Felix |
| Publisher | University of the Western Cape |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | University of the Western Cape |
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